Crimson Nights Review

[Disclosure: I went to the same school as at least some of the developers that work on this game. While I dropped out (because programming isn’t for me) I hold no ill will against the school and never met these developers, as I’m sure they are far younger than me.]

A multiplayer dungeon crawler that plays a bit like a top-down Zelda with tons of look, what could possibly go wrong? A lot, apparently. Like so much that it took me some time to decide whether or not this game should qualify for a Steam Pile review.

Yeah, it is really that bad. Which sucks, because I honestly wanted to like it (like every game).

Playing with one to four customizable knights, Crimson Nights has players traveling deeper and deeper into an endless dungeon with the purpose of…well…continuing to play the game, I guess? Thing is, I don’t know why you’d want to as the combat is repetitive button mashing that has characters slowly slicing in the air in a quarter circle motion in the direction their facing towards repetitive and brain-dead enemies. Not only are enemies stupid, but they also often get stuck on objects in the dungeon, including the corners of walls, making them terribly easy to slay. The cherry on top of the cake is the boss monster (pictured above) that you can literally stand right beside and slice over and over with no fear of damage.

Literally, the only thing you do in this game is advance from room to room where you’re forced to killing enemies before the door unlocks to the next room. After around 25 minutes of this repetitive boredom I called it quits. In that time I’d seen at least five enemies get stuck or randomly disappear, fought the same dull but cool looking boss twice in a row who just happens to be missing a sound effect for one of his attacks.

This game somehow made collecting loot boring, as it happens so often and the loot itself varies so little both stat and visually that I couldn’t be bothered to care. And why would I? As getting better loot just meant I’d be able to clear an infinite number of rooms faster until either my character dies or I die in real life. Oh, and one last thing, every time you enter a new room the music abruptly starts over, which is annoying, to say the least.

If I had to say one good thing about Crimson Nights, it would be that I don’t hate most of the pixel art, but it is hard to get spiders that essentially stick figures wrong.

If you’re looking for a fun dungeon crawler to play with your friends, this isn’t it. Maybe consider buying the much, much, much better Crawl, which is an actually good game. I should know, I’m a worshipable god in it. Honestly, it kind of feels like Crimson Nights desperately wanted to be Crawl, even the logo is similar, but this can’t hold a candle to the combat and pure fun found in Crawl.

“Looking for a fun dungeon crawler to play with your friends? This isn’t it.”

Score: 15/100

[A copy of the game was provided by the developer or publisher for the purpose of this review.]

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